RE: A thought about patents

[Lloyd Wood <l.wood at eim.surrey.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Brijesh Kumar wrote:

> Remember, a patent office works within a legal framework and is not a
> ACM/IEEE technical review committee. Only a US law can stop software
> patents.

Only a *US* law?

What is http://www.wipo.int/ for? WIPO's getting involved in e.g.
domain names, and is probably a better place to raise the issue of
software patents than some navel-gazing backwater which has only
recently grasped the idea of copyright and has yet to abolish 'design
patents'.

L.

software design patents can be incredibly trivial:
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=USD0421974__

<L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>